Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

eric u crazy, NBNW is great.

NxNW : Hitchcock :: Untouchables : De Palma

It's great because the syllogism works (I'd imagine) for both of us.

yeah. untouchables is one of the few de palmas i like. but that's partly cos i saw it when i was like nine and was all "damn, i saw an 18-certificate film."

See, that difference in our tastes I remember.

Tho I don't remember fetishizing T2 for being one of the first superviolent R movies I saw.

let's all be thankful de Palma doesn't have the chops to do a witty Hitchcockian chase film.

ha, I saw The Reivers was on late last night on TCM and my parents pulled us out of that one when the cathouse sequence started. (I think I was 12, sis 10.)

This was the first PG-13 comedy I saw with my parents:

http://is2.okcupid.com/users/962/364/9633658855222444878/mt1129944315.jpg

yes, Morbs, let's ... jesus christ

meanwhile, let's be grateful Chantal Akerman doesn't have the chops to do a Leo McCarey screwball and that Michael Mann doesn't have the chops to do a Budd Boetticher shootout and that Clint Eastwood doesn't have the humanism of Jean Renoir.

suddenly it's Thanksgiving!

Yeah, I'm stifling vomit.

Clint Eastwood doesn't have the humanism of Jean Renoir.

http://www.homevideos.com/movies-covers/Every-Which-Way-But-Loose.jpg

Jeanne Dielman is just a leisurely screwball, and I think A Perfect World was Clint's stab at Renoirism.

Alright, I atone. I don't dislike NxNW even fractionally as much as I love Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, et al. Moving on.

RIP Suzanne Pleshette.

"How do you like our little hamlet?"

Some things I like in The Birds:
The discussion in the Coffee Shop across from the gas station before the explosion.
The cameo by Hitchcock's Sealyhams.

some things I like in The Birds:
lovebirds leaning during the car ride
the three cuts into the pecked-out eyes
the bird lady
"I think you're evil!"
Camille Paglia's BFI monograph

I forgot:
iconic image of birds on monkey bars

Yeah, I figured that whole sequence was a given.

I like when Jessica Tandy shoves her way past Rod and Tippi, with a strangled cry

'the birds' is kind of boring + height of "lame process shots" period yo.

Ooh, do Rear Window next!

For the record, RWF was talking to Alfred Hitchcock.

'the birds' is kind of boring + height of "lame process shots" period

Enter into the spirit of the period, you lame-o.

Haha, brainwashed film snob sheepz0Rz see name 'Hitchcock,' think "masterpiece," being blind to obvious shortcomings, easy targets for ridicule.

the thing of it is that hitch's reputation was partly built on THE VERY FACT THAT HIS PROCESS SHOTS WERE SHITTY!!! honestly, the cahiers legion of hitch stans thought his deliberate carelessness was a fine and good thing.

personally i can get into the period easier when the film properly bumps; but 'the birds' and 'marnie' were calculatedly pretentious films made to impress the critics, who he had noticed were treating him as an Serious Artist. kiss of death.

"The Trouble With Harry" is godawful and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" has a weak second half (not to mention Doris Day's fucking cloying insipidness), but anyone who says "dud" should be hit hard with a heavy hammer.

It is said that what is called the Spirit of an Age is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. In the same way, a single year does not have just spring or summer. A single day, too, is the same. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.

The audio commentary on Criterion Collection's Rebecca (currently out of print) is one of the best I have ever heard...astoundingly informative.

who did it?

"Commentary by film scholar Leonard J. Leff, author of Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood"

Patrick McGilligan's excellent, recentish biog of Hitch makes the point that his pandering to/awareness of the critical discourse surrounding his films easily predates the 60s and his encounters w/ the Cahiers crowd (tho' admittedly Hitch, being something of a Francophile, was esp. pleased by their praise and attention.) Even in the 1920s, Hitch was cultivating his public image, playing up to to the trade and popular press w/ self-consciously 'arty' symbolism, expressionistic imagery/sound design and fluid camerawork, reading up on early film theory and psychoanalytic chitchat, and taking careful note of rival auteurs/critical darlings like Murnau, Ford etc. To me, THE BIRDS and MARNIE don't really seem any more pretentious and studied than, say, VERTIGO or SHADOW OF A DOUBT - it's just, as someone kind've pointed out upthread, the former are let down by dull casting, stodgy scripts and yes, some technical shortcomings (tho' the final attack on Tippi Hedren and then the silent getaway in THE BIRDS still strikes me as pretty bravura filmmaking/editing, and that film's electronic score is one of the greatest soundtracks ever.)

To me, THE BIRDS and MARNIE don't really seem any more pretentious and studied than, say, VERTIGO or SHADOW OF A DOUBT - it's just, as someone kind've pointed out upthread, the former are let down by dull casting, stodgy scripts and yes, some technical shortcomings

I can almost accept this, but those pre-Birds duds were almost all marked by dull casting and stodgy scripts: Shadow of a Doubt, sure, but also The Paradine Case, Lifeboat, The Trouble With Harry, etc.

I have not heard the Leff commentary on Rebecca, but would like to - his Hitchcock/Selznick book is excellent

Unfortunately, the commentary by Dr Drew Casper ("the Alma and Alfred Hitchcock Professor of American Film at USC", god help us) on LIFEBOAT and (in particular) the Peter Bogdanovich commentary on TO CATCH A THIEF are both wretched. The rambling Dr Casper sounds like an academic imagined by Nabokov or Terry Southern, all useless gossip and bogus image analysis; Bogdanovich does his Hitch impression while his interviewer asks him (at least three times!) what his favourite Hitchcock films are (none of which are TO CATCH A THIEF, surprise.)

Yeah, that Hitch/Selznick book was very good.

People who like To Catch A Thief might be interested in the novel The Last Match, written by the same guy who wrote the book To Catch A Thief is based on, David Dodge, and sharing the same Riviera setting.

Shadow Of A Doubt is a dud?

I like Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright's chemistry, but the script is heavy-handed; I've never understood its acclaim.

It's got its flaws but I still really dig Shadow.

Maybe they shoulda made Hume Cronyn a pedo to add some extra frisson

sorry, just had to put 'hume cronyn' and 'frisson' in the same sentence

That was quite good

Shadow as a dud = CRAZY

Patrick McGilligan's excellent, recentish biog of Hitch makes the point that his pandering to/awareness of the critical discourse surrounding his films easily predates the 60s and his encounters w/ the Cahiers crowd (tho' admittedly Hitch, being something of a Francophile, was esp. pleased by their praise and attention.) Even in the 1920s, Hitch was cultivating his public image, playing up to to the trade and popular press w/ self-consciously 'arty' symbolism, expressionistic imagery/sound design and fluid camerawork, reading up on early film theory and psychoanalytic chitchat, and taking careful note of rival auteurs/critical darlings like Murnau, Ford etc.

he's half-right, but the context of the 20s was very unlike the 50s or 60s; intellectuals got to cinema late and were playing catch-up, certainly with guys like hitchcock who grew up with it. he saw murnau at work before anyone in england could have heard of him ('nosferatu' wasn't shown in england till the late 20s). he certainly played up to the press, in some instances (circa 'the ring') to show what a highbrow he was; but he also used his 'umble roots when he wanted to.

the thing was that there wasn't anything particularly 'highbrow' about the german influence at that point -- it was easily compatible with the popular gothic fiction that hitch gre up on, it was seen in regular cinemas, by regular folks.

the point about sound is interesting coz of course *he* (with 'blackmail') converted the highbrows *to* sound -- he wasn't sucking up but showing them them something new. his contact with the self-appointed highbrows of back then was kind of minimal, and when he did appear in 'close up' (the one highbrow film mag of the late 20s and early 30s) he took the opportunity to (gently) deprecate eisenstein.

(hitch was obviously an intelligent guy but proof of his readings of psychoanalysis in the '20s have not been too forthcoming. it's one of those things that rests on supposition.)

by the cahiers era highbrow crit inhabited its own space more, so that "appreciating hollywood cinema" could seem new again -- in the 20s it was less of a big deal.

in the end i think his experimental touches in the 20s, in 'the lodger', say, are more keyed to what he thought the audience would accept than his early 60s stuff.

In any case, Number 17 <<<<<<<< The Birds

Saw Rebecca tonight for the first time in years. George Sanders looks like a young LBJ.

Anyway, it's easily in his top ten, despite the phony denouement. Joan Fontaine = most underrated element? Fontaine handles the awkwardness of a parvenue so well that we squirm, like the scene in which Mrs. Danvers quietly mocks her ("Mrs. De Winter was very particular about sauces") is grueling.

and, yeah, it's better than the novelette.

Looney writer for The Believer: "James Stewart, an amiable actor of limited resources, was the wrong man to play Scottie. The right man, the only man, would have been Henry Fonda."

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200803/?read=article_mckinney

Vertigo is called a masterpiece, but it can’t be. Stewart lacks the physical and psychological ingenuity to embody this dreadfully twisted character. Perfect for Rear Window’s humor and shivery suspense, in Vertigo he is a soft center neither projecting nor inspiring fear, his madness a monotonous mimicry.

OTM!

Casting Stewart against type was one of the best things in Vertigo. It makes his descent towards the end all the more affecting, because you don't expect Jimmy Stewart to go that low.

OTM

blah.

that guy wasted an awful lot of time on this non-question.

xpost

not entirely against type. he'd been playing crazy muthas for anthony mann for a few years by then. and an obsessive in 'rear window' obviously.

I guess you guys have never seen Rear Window, xp